Archive for the ‘Web Services’ Category

File Under: Web Services
Jun
25
2012

Google Drops the Price of Google Maps

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Google Maps versus Apple's new custom maps on iOS.

After several high-profile defections, Google is backpedaling somewhat on its coming fees for using the Google Maps API. The company has significantly reduced the charges it plans to levy on large-scale users, dropping the price from $4 per 1,000 map loads to $.50 per 1,000 map loads (once the site has passed the 25,000-a-day free limit).

The move comes after several big names — including FourSquare and Apple — publicly ditched Google Maps in favor of OpenStreetMap. While neither Apple nor FourSquare has explicitly cited the price increase as a factor in its decision, Google’s Geo Developer blog makes it clear that price was a factor for some users.

“We’ve been listening carefully to feedback,” reads the announcement, which goes on to add “some developers were worried about the potential costs.”

The vast majority of maps hackers and casual developers will probably never be affected by the coming Google Maps pricing structure since the Google Maps API will still be free for the first 25,000 views per day. According to Google only 0.35 percent of sites using the Maps API regularly exceed those limits.

Still, for developers who dream of creating a wildly successful site that does reach those traffic numbers, the Google Maps API will soon be another cost to factor into the plan. And that may be enough to dissuade some from using Google Maps. The price drops may help, but it’s going to be increasingly difficult for big services to justify even the lower price of the Google Maps API when OpenStreetMap is available for free.

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File Under: Web Services
Jun
21
2012

Gmail: Now With Custom Themes

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Webmonkey could be in your Gmail, hanging out. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Google is adding custom themes to Gmail.

Gmail’s web interface has long offered themes, allowing you to change its appearance to suit your whims, but choices were limited to the few canned options Google made available. The color schemes in Gmail themes are still limited to Google’s picks, but now Google is allowing users to upload their own images to create custom backgrounds.

To try out the new options head to Gmail’s settings menu and click the Themes link. Then look for the Custom Themes section where you’ll see a link to “Change your background image.”

To add a custom background you can upload your own images directly, select from your Google+ photos or point Gmail to an online image with a URL. There’s also a featured photos section you can browse and search for some high-quality images.

The new custom images aren’t going to change the way you use Gmail by any means, but if you’re like us and you differentiate accounts by appearance, themes aren’t just eye candy, they’re practical, helping you immediately know which account you’re logged into.

If you aren’t seeing the new Custom Themes section just yet, be patient; as with most Google updates this one is rolling out gradually. In the mean time you can see themes in action in this video from Google:

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Basics, Web Services
May
29
2012

The ‘Internet Underground Music Archive’ Rides Again

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Quick, install Shockwave! Screenshot: The IUMA homepage in 1996.

The origins of the online music revolution are back, thanks to internet archivist extraordinaire Jason Scott. Scott, who works for the internet preservation group Archive.org, has resurrected the Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA as the kids called it back in 1992, when they were uploading songs via Gopher.

Started at the University of California at Santa Cruz by Jeff Patterson, Jon Luini and Rob Lord, the IUMA’s goal was to create an online music archive for unsigned musicians and bands. The idea was simple: Bands uploaded files and sent them out to fans over Usenet or e-mail. And just like that, the internet music revolution was born.

The IUMA site eventually came to host thousands of bands and hundreds of thousands of songs, many in MP2 and other long-since-abandoned audio formats.

Like so many other sites of that era, IUMA was eventually sold off during the dot-com boom years to a series of clueless owners who let the site die a slow death of neglect until it was shut down completely in 2006 (hmm, why does that sound so familiar?). Fortunately John Gilmore — perhaps best known for helping to start the Electronic Frontier Foundation — had the foresight to grab a copy of the site shortly before it disappeared.

Now Scott has used Gilmore’s tape archives to resurrect the IUMA site. As Scott says, “you are in for a treat and a hell of a lot of modern musical history just got saved.” The rescued archive doesn’t have everything that ever appeared on IUMA, but it does resurrect some 25,000 bands and artists and over 680,000 tracks of music. That’s 243 days worth of music for those of you more accustomed to iTunes than IUMA.

Scott says this resurrected version of IUMA should be “considered 1.0” and has promised to make sure the original data is “stored safely away so the next set of folks can try better techniques to get it back.”

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File Under: APIs, Multimedia, Web Services
May
24
2012

Flickr Amps Up the Social With New ‘Groups’ Features

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Flickr's new group pool pages, now with "justified" view.

Flickr has made some small but welcome upgrades to the cornerstone of its social features — Flickr Groups. The changes include a new way to view group pools and the ability to post directly to groups using Flickr’s new HTML5 uploader.

Flickr lacks the hype of more recent photo-sharing services like Instagram, but remains popular with pro and amateur photographers alike at least in part because of the community that continues, despite some stumbles, to exist on the site. Much of that community is built around Flickr Groups, like-minded photographers banding together to share images of anything from beautiful mountains to sushi to a shared love of RAW images from micro 4/3 cameras.

In an effort to make it easier for Flickr fans to contribute to Groups, Flickr’s recently updated photo uploader now offers an option to share your photos with any group you’ve joined directly from the upload page.

Perhaps more importantly, Flickr is extending the Flickr API with the same features, making it possible for third-party applications — like your favorite iOS and Android photo apps — to add the same group sharing features. Developers can check out the Flickr code blog for more on what’s new in the Flickr API.

As part of today’s Groups upgrade, Flickr is also extending its “justified” view — which tiles images to fit more photos at larger sizes in a smaller space — to Group photo pools. Along with the justified view, Group Photo Pool pages now have a persistent (but collapsible) sidebar where you can quickly access group discussion threads, view tags and see the top contributors.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Services
May
15
2012

Flickr Goes Big With Larger Images, Responsive Redesign

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Flickr: now with bigger images and a (mostly) responsive design.

Flickr recently changed its “lightbox” photo pages — the darker photo-friendly interface on the site — to display much larger photos. Now the grandfather of online photo-sharing sites is rolling out a site-wide redesign that uses the same big, beautiful images to put your photos front and center on every page.

The larger images in Flickr’s revamped photo pages put the emphasis where it belongs — on your photos. Peripheral information, like comments, maps, tags, set info and so on are still there, they’re just now (rightly) dwarfed by the actual image.

The result is a much more photo-centric site that does a nice job of differentiating itself from the current trend of low-res, filter-heavy photo0sharing services.

Web developers, take note: Flickr’s new layout isn’t just eye-catching, it’s also somewhat responsively designed — adjusting to the myriad screens on the web today and displaying the best photo possible without clogging your tubes with huge photo downloads. Flickr does stop short of scaling pages down to phone-size screens — for which there is a separate mobile website — but it resizes nicely to handle tablets.

That’s right, Flickr is the latest (and perhaps the largest) website to embrace not just a mostly responsive design with a liquid layout and media queries, but also a responsive approach to images.

We’ve looked at dozens of ways to handle images in a responsive design, but Flickr has opted for a custom setup that uses a bit of server-side PHP and some JavaScript to serve images based on screen size. Flickr is also using a custom algorithm that takes the width and height of the screen into account and “will display content at a width that will best showcase the most common photo ratio, the 4:3.”

For more details on how Flickr is handling the responsive aspects of the new design, check out the Flickr code blog.

Developers working with the Flickr API should note that the new photo sizes are now available through the Flickr API if your app or website would also like to display larger images.

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